Product development is becoming increasingly complex. The pace of technological
change grows daily, leaving little time to accumulate expertise before development
of a new product begins. Acquiring enough experience to be able to predict the
risk and develop the courses of action during the development is difficult and often
happens during the course of the true developmental phases of the new product
development. This situation creates a need for tapping into the skills and abilities
of all the participants in the development effort and relying less on heroic efforts
to save the day and carry the project and product to a successful conclusion. Even
when we have product development heroes and they carry the day, the loss of these
individuals to the organization will be detrimental to the organization and represents
a human resources risk. The recovery period can be prolonged for organizations with
poor team practices and those that favor heroic actions.
We are presenting a modified version of the agile software development tool
scrum as an alternative to traditional program management and as a tool for standard
line management. Both of us have experience in deploying and implementing the
tool. We understand the pitfalls of this method, which we will elucidate during the
course of our discussion.
We are not saying that we believe the waterfall approach should be condemned
to obscurity or that we are calling for the death of this development model. In fact,
we know of few organizations that take the waterfall method as it is often portrayed
in books; that is, taking it to be a rigid and one-way pass through the development
process. In fact, there are some similarities between the methods, although scrum
approach throughput is quicker and keeps people focused on what is deemed important
by the project managers. Basically scrum is to the waterfall approach what
lean manufacturing (especially one-piece flow) is to batch-mode manufacturing.
Additionally, the team aspects of the method—moving toward self-directed work
teams—means the actions of the team must be successful and are largely in the hands
of the team itself. The concept of a self-directed work team also suggests we must
have a motivated and skilled team capable of achieving project goals. It is unwise to
condemn conventional tactics across the board, when frequently the conventional
tactics are not executed well. Poor execution does not improve the probability of
